Posts tagged ‘Google’

If your small business is not blogging and marketing on WordPress and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Pinterest and Stumbledupon and Digg and Reddit and Delicious and … the ridiculous list goes on.

Even if your job consisted of nothing more than producing content for these modern-day monsters you would be hard pressed to keep them satisfied. But, if you are not connected online and everyone else is, won’t you lose out? Will your small business be forgotten?

Well there is a way to blog and tweet and stay LinkedIn without losing your life or your business to social media.

Here are seven ways you can be connected online without living online.

7. Blogging for more business

Writing a blog produces new content for Google to use to push your website up its rankings. To get blogging done well but fast:

Use your own life

Finding ideas for blogging can be tough, but using your own experience is an inexhaustible supply of new ideas. We are not very interested in what you had for lunch, but your experience of customer service good or bad in a particular restaurant could be just the dish best served warm.

Allocate some time

Set a time limit and use a timer (like a kitchen timer). 30 minutes should be enough to get your blog written

6. LinkedIn for more sales

If you have a profile on LinkedIn that’s a start but do you also join groups where you clients hang out? If you do, you can find out what they are interested in and share your expertise with them through your posts into their groups. It’s a fast track to getting to know your prospective clients.

5. Twitter to find clients

Twitter can drain your entire day if you let it run you, but if you grab Twitter by the wings you can be in charge.

Fall in love with that kitchen timer from #7, and set yourself just 7 minutes in the morning and 7 in the afternoon/evening. You can keep up with what is going on in your sector, schedule at least 7 tweets and retweet 7 things during these 14 minutes.

4. Facebook brings your more than friends

If you are selling directly to consumers, Facebook is where it is at. Same principle as Twitter applies – use that timer to stop you getting too involved in cousin Jan’s cool photos of kittens.

3. Google plus – adds value

Google gets over 2 million searches every single minute of every single day and Google is looking for new signals that your content is popular. By sharing your content on Google plus, (the clue is in the name) and if your contacts re-share it, then you are getting votes for your content. Add a Google+ button to your browser bar and you can +1 anything you read on the fly.

2. YouTube is enough to give you goggle eyes

Also owned by Google, YouTube gets 4 billion video views every day. A really fast way to share your content is to upload your own videos. It doesn’t have to be super-polished.

Gary Vaynerchuk http://tv.winelibrary.com/2010/06/ built a multi-million dollar wine business from his opinionated, some would say obnoxious, video blogs. Every time I upload a Bizfix video to YouTube it is shows high rankings in Google search almost instantaneously: it’s a very fast way to get your company noticed.

1. Keyword research is not just for the nerds

Keyword research is probably the most important and most under-used tool for speeding up your online marketing. If you don’t do keyword searched before you name your company, name your product, write blog posts, or write content for your company website, you are missing the bullet train to getting found on Google.

So now you have seven ways you can do online marketing for your small business in minutes per day, not days per week.

What’s your top tip for marketing your business online without wasting time?

Guest author Chris Markham of Bizfix, the Cambridge business advice and support company, is on a mission to get more science, evidence and fact into local business support. You can find more of his small business writing on his blog.

The information provided in this blog illustrates my opinions and experiences, it does not constitute advice and I do not accept responsibility for any actions taken or refrained from as a result of reading this post.

If you found this post interesting/useful please share it with your social network and/or bookmark it. Also, your comments are always valued and will help me to write new posts that are relevant to readers of this blog.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has recently released new guidelines for Cookie Compliance which affects UK website owners and is based on a new EU directive.

I wonder how many of us even know if cookies are used on our website(s)?

What does the law say?

Some of the points within the guidelines will mean as website owners, you will need to make changes to your website, to avoid the risk of prosecution.

I won’t go though all the guidelines here, you may well nod off, but the main point is that the responsibility for educating users about cookies and how they are used on your website has been devolved to.

This will include informing users about your and 3rd party cookies should your site be using them (e.g. Google Analytics). This legislation is to be enforced from May 2012. It is actually a legal requirement already but we are in a grace period.

Ashley Freidlein from Econsultancy summarises some key points in his article Cookie Compliance or you can read the full guidelines from the ICO here who you will see ask for cookie approval already.

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small text file that a website may put onto the visitor’s computer to “mark” that visitor.

The website may want to mark the visitor for a variety of reasons.

Examples may be to track a user’s basket as they shop or a retain a user’s website preferences.

How are other people complying with the legislation?

For an example of compliance, you can look at the Information Commissioner’s Office website. At the top of the page you will see the Cookie notice that they have constructed and installed.

How do you know if your site uses cookies?

It is not immediately obvious if a website uses cookies to work effectively.

Cookies are very frequently used for a variety of situations including, but not limited to, remembering a log-in password and managing a shopping basket. I would recommend carrying out a cookie audit to answer this question.

What should you do now?

To get on the right side of the law, you should find out what cookies are being used on your website by carrying out an audit. We can do that for you – I would estimate an hour’s work. Once you know what cookies are on the site (if any), we can help you formulate a plan for informing the user of their purpose and possibly allowing the user to opt out.

If there are no cookies on your website, we will not charge for the audit! If you’re still confused about cookies, please call me for a nice explanation 😉 If you would like to request an audit, please let me know.

Best Regards, Nigel White

01480 878510

The information provided in this blog illustrates my opinions and experiences, it does not constitute advice and I do not accept responsibility for any actions taken or refrained from as a result of reading this post.

If you found this post interesting/useful please share it with your social network and/or bookmark it. Also, your comments are always valued and will help me to write new posts that are relevant to readers of this blog.